Logan's Run

by William F. Nolan

When Crazy Horse Mountain was dedicated, the great mass of granite became the site of a monumental project which was to consume half a century. An Indian warrior, 563 feet high and 641 feet long, would ride the land, carved from six million tons of Dakota stone. A mountain would become a man, towering above black-forest wilderness, dwarfing the giant heads of Rushmore. The sculptor was Korczak Ziolkowski, and under his direction 150,000 tons of rock would be ripped away each year to form his dream. After a decade, more than a million tons of living granite lay in rubble at the foot of the looming mountain—and the feather of the great War Chief of the Ogallala Sioux began to emerge. Obsessed by his vision, Ziolkowski ranged the continents, prying money from the pockets of the rich, the vain, the titled—which he spent on blasting powder, dynamite, cordite, tools, winches and rope. The work went on. Gradually the mountain sheared away. Nations threw their combined resources behind it, fired by the dramatic image of a great fighting chieftain on a wild-maned stallion. Thousands of laborers and artists toiled on the flanks of the plunging horse. Diamond drillbits and jackhammers tore at the granite heart of the mountain. And, with infinite slowness, the mammoth figure took its place against the Dakota sky: Tashunca-uitco. Crazy Horse. The ruthless Indian genius who directed the annihilation of Custer’s Seventh on the Little Big Horn. The world marveled. —